Lateral thinking puzzles

For Christmas I received quite a large book of 'Classic Lateral Thinking Puzzles' (from my Uncle and Aunty ). It contains many different conundrums, all which seem to not have enough information to be able to solve them. I've read through a few and almost all of them seem to have multiple answers - then on checking the back of the book, the answer seems either really far-fetched or extremely simple. I'll post some here and see if you can solve them.

I found this first one to be one of the 'better' ones - that is, not *quite* as silly an answer.

Shoe Shop Shuffle'In a small town there are four shoe shops of about the same size, each carrying more of less the same line in shoes. Yet, one shop loses three times as many shoes to theft as each of the other shops. Why?'

Re: Lateral thinking puzzles

Re: Lateral thinking puzzles

Zach wrote:

All depends on the position of the shops in conjunction with all the other shops.

I would agree. If one shop loses 3 times as many as all the other shops, then it is losing half of the total shoes lost.So, I would guess that that shop was on its own, but the other three were next to each other.

Re: Lateral thinking puzzles

Maybe three different bunch of thieves steal the three different shop shops but they all meet at the fourth shoe shop so that they could go home together. So in the fourth shop all three of them steals, resulting in a theft level that is three times as more.